Pilbara Coast Australia

Vibrant with colour, what sets this area apart from other remote

regions of North Australia is the rock.

The Pilbara - in the northwest corner of Western Australia, a vast,

russet-red landscape, saturated in mineral riches.

Not so very long ago, this was one of the wildest,

most remote regions on the planet.

And yet, today,

threading their way through it all are Leviathans of the 21st century.

Joining me on this exceptional adventure,

palaeontologist Tim Flannery enters a hot zone from the Cold War.

We're getting a significant reading of the Geiger counters.

It's in the red zone, isn't it?

-A salty harvest for marine biologist Emma Johnston.

-Ah!

We join an elite team of welders, who practice their alchemy underwater.

Er, conditions are horrible today. Pretty treacherous.

And I help to park an ocean giant.

-A metre between the bottom of this monster and the seabed?

-Yes.

This is the Pilbara, and this is Coast Australia.

Our Pilbara expedition begins on the remote Montebello Islands,

travels across the Burrup Peninsula east to Port Hedland

and ends at Cape Keraudren.

A day's sail northwest from Dampier and you'll happen upon

the Montebello Islands, a perfect example of postcard isolation.

And it's that remoteness which attracted the strategic eyes

and secret slide rules of Britain's emerging Cold War warriors.

Four years before Maralinga, this was to be the first

site for British nuclear testing in Australia.

With restricted access,

this is a special journey for Professor Tim Flannery,

who's on a mission to uncover the remains of Operation Hurricane

and the chill winds of history.

I've arrived on Trimouille Island in the Montebello Archipelago

and I'm here with some trepidation, because this was the site

where the British exploded their first atomic weapon.

This place was covered in radioactive fallout,

much of it falling in the form of a torrent of toxic rain

and that means that even today,

it's dangerous to linger on Trimouille for too long.

Britain entered the 1950s a diminished power.

The Cold War was gathering anxiety

and Churchill wanted to ensure Britain's place in the nuclear club.

By 1952, they were ready to test their first bomb.

What they needed now was a suitable site.

Parks and wildlife senior reserves officer Dr Peter Kendrick

has studied this little-known moment in Australian history.

Why did their eyes fall on the Montebellos?

-Well, it wasn't going to be Scotland, was it?

-No.

So the Russians developing the bomb frightened the West really badly

and they were afraid that somebody would put a device

on a ship and explode it in somewhere like the Thames.

So they wanted to understand how to build civil defence

to cope with that kind of scenario.

So they chose this place because the lagoon here is like a large harbour

and it gave them a whole pile of vantage points around the lagoon

where they could put instrumentation to test the effect of a blast.

In June 1952, the bomb was buried in the belly of HMS Plym,

a retired British frigate, sailed from London

and moored 400 metres off the beach in Maine Bay,

much to the ignorance of the Australian public.

We had a Prime Minister at the time who refused to share with

his cabinet, with the government, that this test was going to occur.

So to get you right there, the Australian Prime Minister hid from the people of Australia the

fact that a nuclear weapon was going to be detonated on Australian soil?

-Yeah, until it happened.

-And his own cabinet colleagues?

-Yes.

The test would measure the blast impact

and gamma radiation on a range of elements,

including civil defence structures, fresh and canned food, to clothing.

With favourable wind and weather conditions,

the countdown began on the morning of October 3rd.

The device - a plutonium implosion bomb, similar to Fat Man,

the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

Five, four, three, two, one - now.

Radioactivity can linger for millennia.

A more obvious reminder of that first explosion

is the crater in the seabed, still visible today.

This is an old vehicle from the testing period, Tim.

It's a Willys Jeep.

And it was either put here on the island as a test object

for the first test, or perhaps one of the later ones.

-Is it likely still to be hot?

-Well, we can test it.

-We've got a Geiger counter.

-Mmm. I can hear something.

-There you go.

-That's in the red zone.

-Yeah.

-Is that dangerous?

-Stand back, I think!

-You really... You really don't want to touch metal objects on the Montes.

-Yeah, yeah.

-You don't know where they're from, you don't know where they've been.

-Yes.

Four years later, in 1956,

the second bomb was detonated on Trimouille Island.

Eyewitness and broadcaster Ken Casillas was part of the supporting Australian Navy at the time.

-Hello, Ken.

-Hello, Tim.

-Welcome back to the Montebellos.

-This is an amazing feeling.

This was my home for about six weeks in 1956.

So, Ken, is this the first time you've been back in what, 58 years?

-58 long years.

-How old were you?

I was 19, and I'd heard about Nagasaki and Hiroshima

and places like that and read about them,

but I didn't really take much notice about atomic bombs.

They did tell us we were going to see an explosion.

We weren't briefed at all about it.

We weren't told about any dangers of anything like that.

We were wearing navy blue shorts and shirts and sandals and that's all.

-Really?

-Yes.

Unlike the British scientists, who came well-prepared with

protective clothing and all manner of radiation-detecting devices.

What actually happened? Tell me about the day.

We were all told to stand on the steel deck of the ship

and face away from the explosion.

'Three, two, one.'

First thing we saw was this blinding yellow flash.

As one, we turned around and then,

-we felt the after-shock about a minute later.

-Right.

This huge booming sound.

It was an enormous noise, sort of like a whiplash noise

but magnified about 1,000 times.

It was a tremendous shock and the after wave

-sort of sent you back a bit.

-Right.

-And you tried to see the mushroom go up.

-Really?

It very quickly got up high in the sky

and there was quite a breeze that morning and then the mushroom

started to fade away with the wind blowing down in that direction.

-Towards the mainland?

-M'hm.

-Ah, my goodness.

Bizarrely, they were allowed back just two days after the blast.

When we came back into this lagoon here, I saw tens of thousands

of dead fish floating all through this wonderful beach along here.

And then there were dead turtles on the beach

and we used to wander into the water.

We didn't know whether it was too badly contaminated,

even though the fish were still there, dead.

-It was a terrible sight.

-Yes.

After the third blast, costs and difficulties of testing up here

forced the British onto the mainland, to South Australia and Maralinga,

where testing continued until 1963,

with ongoing consequences for the local population.

So, Ken, have you had any health effects from that experience?

I don't think I've suffered, even though several of my mates are all

up in heaven now and several of them died reasonably young with cancer.

-Oh, really?

-Yes, yes. I always said, "Well, what happens happens."

It was historical high-stakes, with winners and losers

framed within the vexed question of "what price peace?"

For better or for worse, the Montebellos, a barren scatter

of islands off the Pilbara Coast, are part of that legacy.

While the Aboriginal presence here dates back thousands of years,

the Pilbara changed gears when big industry arrived in the 1960s.

Today, Dampier is one of two Pilbara hubs,

exporting petrochemicals, gas and iron ore to an energy-hungry world.

There's another natural mineral being shipped out of here,

and Professor Emma Johnson has come to Dampier to find why Pilbara

is the ideal place for its production.

You expect to see dunes on the coast, but this isn't sand.

These are mountains of pure sodium chloride.

It's essential for our bodies,

it flavours our food and, in Roman times, it was currency.

Salt has been part of human history since time began.

In the Pilbara, before big business arrived,

graziers would collect naturally occurring salt,

deposited by the big king tides, as a lick for their stock.

Today, salt is harvested here on an industrial scale,

thanks to an inexhaustible supply.

Here at the Dampier Salt mines, they're turning seawater into salt.

Our oceans contain more salt than anywhere else on the planet.

One estimate claims that all the salt in the ocean would cover

the Earth's continents to a depth of 125 metres.

Someone who knows how to harvest it is chemist Shaun Triner.

What's so special about the Dampier area for the salt?

Well, it's really good, because those very high

rates of evaporation, which is good for evaporating water and producing

salt and low levels of rainfall, so it's a perfect location.

This is the start of the salt production process, Emma,

where we've got the water from the Indian Ocean

coming in from this side and then it's moving through our pump

station and into pond zero, which is the first pond in our system.

The seawater contains every chemical element that occurs

naturally on the Earth and what we're trying to do is simply

extract the sodium and the chlorine.

Making salt's not just about chemistry.

It's about the biology, as well.

Right behind me, there's a pond of a couple of thousand bream.

They're feeding on crustaceans that are feeding on phytoplankton.

It's like a bio-filtration process,

whereby the nutrients in the seawater are gradually removed.

The seawater is pumped through a series of evaporating ponds

that stretch 22km and located between the Burrup Peninsula

and Karratha township to the south.

-So we're at pond two?

-Yeah.

We're just about starting the crystallisation of gypsum here.

You can grab a sample.

-Whoa!

-Excellent.

-There we go.

Now we're going to test the density.

So we pop the device in there, squirt up some solution

and you can see we're at 1.09.

Sea water would have been 1.03, or something?

Yeah, that's right, so you can see it's concentrated quite a way.

1.21 will be the density when we're crystallising salt,

so we're about halfway through the process here.

This must be very salty by now. Can I have a taste, or is it...?

You can certainly try it.

-Eurgh!

-Yeah, see?

-Argh!

That is really, really salty!

It takes two years to go from the gushing pipes in pond zero to the

sparkling stillness of the crystallising fields.

So, essentially, the ocean water that floods in is a soup of different

materials, and you're trying to concentrate it down into a broth

and then evaporate all the water off and then get that little stock cube. Is that right?

A perfect salt crystal is actually a perfect cube, so yeah,

that's a good analogy.

This has been growing for 12 months now and it's ready to be harvested.

It takes 65 tonnes of seawater to collect one tonne of salt.

This bed is about 30 centimetres thick and will yield 180,000 tonnes -

enough to fill 72 swimming pools.

But this salt isn't destined for the dinner table.

In fact, only 11% of the world's salt is eaten.

The bulk is separated into individual components of sodium and chlorine

and poured into thousands of industrial products,

such as paper, glass, fertilisers, textiles and chemicals.

It might sound strange, but in order to be used in industry,

Dampier Salt must be purer than the sort we eat.

These coloured salts are considered the boutique food market.

The essential trace elements in there add a lot of flavour to the salt.

The difference is easy to see

when you put it next to the gourmet salt from the Murray river,

or France and the Himalayas.

The calcium, the magnesium, the sulphate that we try to remove in our process

actually stays in the salt in these processes,

so, in food, they call those important trace elements.

We just call them impurities in the chemical business.

-You call them dirt!

-Yeah.

OK, well, let me try the French grey.

-Quite salty.

-It's very salty and quite tasty, actually.

-M'hm.

-Mmm.

Right, I was going to compare it with the Dampier Salt.

-A lot less salty, isn't it?

-It is. It does taste pure.

What it actually is, is it's less bitter.

The magnesium in the salt actually makes it taste better

and because our salt really has very little magnesium left in it,

it's got that... Less of a tang.

What do you use at home?

-I use this.

-The Dampier Salt.

-Absolutely.

I haven't bought any salt since I've been with the salt business for 19 years.

SHE LAUGHS

Salts ain't salts.

Low rainfall and plenty of sun

and make this an ideal location for growing it.

Combined with its two partner fields in Port Hedland and Lake McLeod,

ten million tonnes are shipped annually -

the world's largest exporter of solar salt.

Salt was once traded ounce for ounce with gold. Those days are gone.

But this essential mineral will continue to be valued long

after Australia's other mineral riches have dwindled to dust.

In northwest Western Australia, one element dominates.

It's what puts the road into the Pilbara.

Iron. It's one of the Earth's most abundant rock-forming features

and particularly up here, with 80% of Australia's identified reserves.

It's mined as iron ore, as Dampier port manager Nick Serle tells me.

So this is iron ore. The main type of iron ore in here is

-haematite so if we have a look here, you can see.

-It sparkles, as well.

-Yes, yes.

So the way they used to check as to whether it was actually iron

ore some years ago was to actually take the grey-looking mineral

and actually scratch it and as you can see there...

-It comes up red.

-..much more red.

We start off by drilling a lot of holes

and putting explosive in so we can blast the ore body.

That's being picked up with massive diggers

and put in enormous haul trucks and hauled to the crushing plant.

It's then crushed down to material around this size.

That's loaded onto massive trains. The trains are 2.4km long.

That snake 300km to Port Dampier where it's unloaded

and stockpiled, ready for export.

So we see the two loaded ore cars coming in now.

-But you don't need to take the train apart?

-No, no.

It stays all coupled together, so you'll see, it'll stop in a moment.

And then these clamps will hold the top of the ore car as it rotates.

There we go. So the clamp's on.

-And that's dumping 230 tonnes every time.

-It's unbelievable.

Yes, pretty amazing.

It's like watching two big giant hands just take two of the carriages and just go...!

These stockpiles are around about 200,000 tonnes, which is

also the same amount that the average ship takes,

so one of the stockpiles you see here fits in one ship.

On any given day, they can be 30 or more ships awaiting their turn

to steam in and load up.

I want to have a look at one of these ocean giants for myself.

200.

I'm heading out with port pilot Warwick Poulton,

whose job is to guide these super-sized carriers

into Dampier through the shipping channel and avoiding local traffic.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love time spent aboard boats.

All sorts - yachts, cruisers, even Viking long ships -

but never in my life have I set foot aboard a monster like that.

That's a class known as a very large ore carrier.

I've got to get me one of them.

The Tom Price, 319 metres or three soccer fields long.

It's like dropping onto an island.

It was almost frightening to land on something this big.

This is too big to believe.

Dampier Port. Good afternoon. Pilot on board.

Vessel is west of seaboard, inbound for Parker point four. Thank you.

How does it feel to take control of something this size?

It's a huge responsibility.

And you don't take it lightly,

but it's good because I've got the support

of all the bridge crew up here.

-Hard to starboard.

-Hard to starboard.

-Thank you.

So, Neil, there is a shallow patch in our channel

so I have to be over there at 13.30 and the tide is going down,

so we've really got to get it moving.

When you come over it,

how much water will there be between the hull and the sand?

-About a metre. A metre, yeah.

-A metre?

-Yeah.

-Between the bottom of this monster and the seabed?

-Yes, yes.

152 will pick out the tugs here off the north mark.

We'll be using four tugs today.

We'll put one satellite out because we need him

as a break for this wind.

Look at that. Even the pilot's talking about how shallow the water is here.

There's only a metre, a metre and a half beneath the hull

and before you hit the seabed and that's why the mud here is

getting churned up by the propellers.

And the tug sitting there, fastened onto us with a rope,

that's acting as a break.

That actually there dragging the boat backwards to try and hold it

and slow it down.

Falcon, away to reduce to half. Midships now, please.

Dead slow astern now, please, captain.

Can you let me know when the stern is clear of the bow of the other ship?

I used to feel quite good about my parallel parking. Not any more!

After an 8,000km voyage from China...

We'll come alongside now.

..this horizontal skyscraper is eased in by centimetres.

A miscalculation here can cost millions in damages.

And Neptune stop. That's it from me. I'll see you later.

The Tom Price will take on 226,000 tonnes of iron ore,

which will make enough steel to build three Sydney Harbour Bridges

and that's just one of three shiploads today at this port.

The numbers of big Australia.

When I first encountered these ships and these machines,

I was overawed by the size of them, and rightly so.

But having spent some time watching the mining operation,

what I'm truly struck by is just how small the efforts are.

The only things that are truly huge here are this land and this coast.

The Pilbara has evolved slowly over 3.5 billion years.

The human imprint has advanced a little faster.

Dr Alice Garner is setting out from Karratha to find out

how this stretch of coast has changed in just a few decades

from outback isolation to pastoral enterprise and now, industrial hub.

Long before Karratha the town, there was Karratha station,

a sprawling property owned by Bill and Normie Leslie from 1929 to 1966.

Their 300,000-acre station included

an idyllic 65km stretch of coastline.

King Bay was a regular escape for the Leslies and daughter

Tish Lees - in the rowboat - who's written about her growing up in the Pilbara.

It was a wonderful spot that Dad loved coming to,

because it was a fantastic beach for catching the sea mullet.

We'd barbecue those on the beach - Dad's catch of the day -

and swim off the beach and so on, and it was a lovely protected area.

Presented with a film camera in 1936,

Tish's mother, Normie, became an avid chronicler, creating a rare

filmic record of life and times up here in the remote northwest.

Which island are we on?

Malice Island, one of a number -

I think it's 40-odd islands - in the archipelago.

Do you have any particularly dear memories of this time on the coast?

Um, yes. The special one was annual camp, catching crayfish.

My father was an expert at that.

Then when we'd go back to the camp, the crayfish would be put into

a 44-gallon drum full of boiling water and that would be lunch and dinner.

Three meals a day, actually, when I come to think about I!

Tish's father, Bill, wanted to share the bounty of this

part of Western Australia but, at the time, desolation

and hardship were taking a toll on the sparse population.

Bill Leslie called a meeting of government officials and locals

in 1945, where he famously announced that there were more people working

for Myers in Melbourne than they were living north of the 26th parallel.

Good friend Lang Hancock, seen here with wife Hope,

shared Bill's passion to galvanise the northwest

and it wasn't long before their ambitions were realised.

In 1952, Hancock discovered iron ore here.

It was the moment that would change the Pilbara

and the Leslies' lives for ever.

Tish, you were part of the early development of Dampier over here,

what was your role?

Karratha, the township,

was built on Karratha Station

and our homestead was only 20 miles away.

So I was approached to take on a position as secretary,

so I did all the secretarial

work for the manager during the project, at the King Bay end.

The iron ore rush drew people quickly.

Infrastructure sprang up.

A railway from mine site to port

cut straight through the Leslies' property.

Ironically, Tish's father's tireless campaign for the development

of the northwest had made living there untenable.

So, in 1966, they sold up

and left with their treasured memories of a pioneering life.

The transformation was huge -

from absolutely nothing, to developing an iron ore mine

200 miles inland and bringing it down by rail,

shipping the ore to Japan.

And that all happened in 16 months, which was pretty miraculous

with the lack of communications and so on in those days.

And a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people.

Drifting east from Dampier,

along the brackish deltas and muddy embroidery of the Pilbara coastline,

are the occasional ghost towns,

such as Cossack, that stand as memories of better times.

And further along, just an echo of Condon -

a seaward hamlet that history has almost forgotten.

You wouldn't think, looking at it today, that this

was once an international wool port.

At the end of the 19th century,

wool from the first pastoral lease in northwestern Australia

went direct from here - the mudflats at the mouth of the Condon Creek -

to market, in London!

'Julie Hunt from the Port Hedland Historical Society is

'intrigued by this memory from another economic era.'

It's hard to believe now that this was a town.

It had a pub, it had a post office, it had a racecourse.

The pearlers would come here,

people would come in from the stations all around.

They would come from Marble Bar,

because this was a really busy little town.

Why did all the action happen here?

The first station in the Pilbara was De Grey Station,

just down the track.

And obviously they were growing their sheep

and they needed a port to export their wool.

And this was the closest creek that they could establish a port.

So if we were here when it was all going strong,

what would we have been looking at?

There was no jetty at the time, so the Arabella, which was

a ship with...a flat-bottomed ship, would come up

and it would rest on the mud here and they'd take the bullock wagons,

loaded up with wool, all the way out onto the mudflats

and start to unload it by hand, bale by bale.

So the whole thing depended on the tide being out,

-so that the wagons could move?

-Absolutely.

So it was done at low tide, and then they had to have it unloaded

or have the bullocks moving back in before the tide came in.

You know, seven-metre tides, they do move quite quickly.

So that the wagon trains pulled by animals and men, would be

-completely at the mercy of the incoming tide?

-Exactly.

And they would have had to have unyoked these animals here and sort

of run in and left them to their own devices

to find their own way ashore.

You don't think of the wool trade being a matter of life and death.

-No. No!

-It was up here.

Exactly. Everything's life-and-death up here.

The creek eventually silted over

and a deeper harbour was found in nearby Port Hedland.

But from 1895, for six whole years,

the Arabella collected wool from here

and delivered it direct to London.

Today, technology has consigned a lot of the old ways to history.

No more bullock-drawn wagon trains traversing great distances

and treacherous mudflats.

Nowadays, the livestock's journey to market is a lot less hazardous.

I've come just a little further up the coast

to the historic De Grey Station.

Established in the 1860s, this was the first pastoral lease

in the Pilbara and it grew the wool that was exported from Condon.

Today, it's cattle country.

And at one million acres,

it's bigger than some small European countries!

With 20,000 head to muster over such vast distances,

THIS is the best way to do it efficiently.

Mark Bettini is the pilot and station owner since 1996.

Unlike the old days in Condon of raising the tide to load ships,

his cattle are trucked to Broome for the domestic and Asian markets.

While stock work continues, I have jumped in with Mark who is

flying over to join his family at his favourite paddock, by the beach.

I think, actually, this is what I always imagined Australia looked like.

You know, it's just because there is no break in the flat terrain.

You feel as if you are surrounded by the sea up here.

Well, we are. It is almost a peninsula.

Being so close to the coast, we always get a seabreeze.

-That is the De Grey river?

-That is the De Grey river.

So, that's your main water supply?

It's a 90km-long water trough.

And to the left is where we put our weaners.

Cattle roamed far over this Australian pastorale.

With the luminous coastline beckoning, just beyond the flatlands of Spinifex and Salt Bush.

How does it feel to look out and know that all of this is yours?

All this million acres? Does it own you or do you own it?

Well... I think that's probably more to the point.

Oh, look at that!

THEY LAUGH

-You've got the sharks back there.

-Sharks?

-Yeah, I think so.

'It's an improbable setting for a Pilbara cattleman.

'But the station's 60 kilometres of spectacular seashore

'offer Mark and his family the best of both worlds -

'a big country with a wild coastal veranda.'

When we first came here to the station by the coast,

I was down here every weekend, fishing. I really appreciate it.

You have got kids.

Do you think that you will be able to hand this onto them?

Will they stay here as well?

I'll leave it in as good or better shape

for the next generation, definitely.

And if my kids, if that's what they want to do,

I'd be more than happy to pass it on.

-Crazy crab shell!

-You all right?

Off out there, to the west,

is the almost endless Indian Ocean.

In that direction, to the east, kilometre after kilometre

after kilometre, of red sand.

Isolation and merciless elements, they're the constants here.

In these parts, the folk call themselves "Nor'Westers of the Pilbara Breed"

and it's got a nice frontier ring to it.

It's also salute to what it takes to make it here.

The heave-ho of heavy industry is a constant

backdrop for life along the Pilbara's coastal towns.

But there's also much activity that's less obvious, churning within

the intertidal flats that flank Port Hedland's mega structures.

Pick the right time and tide,

and a beach here becomes and ethereal canvas for marine ecologist

Professor Emma Johnston to step into and wander through

the eddies between science and art.

It's dawn.

And as the sun rises over Port Hedland's Cemetery Beach,

this massive tide is receding really rapidly

and revealing an enormous hidden reef.

This reef supports a diverse habitat for a range of species,

some of which have yet to be identified.

Look at this!

That's a little warty sea cucumber, by the looks.

Haven't seen this species before.

This little fella will be eating all of the muddy sediment that is

sitting around here and then pooping out really clean sand.

That's why we've got a nice clean beach - because of sea cucumbers like this.

As a scientist, this intertidal zone is an endlessly fascinating

array of complex habitats.

But I'm not the only one studying the reef this morning.

Renowned WA artist Larry Mitchell is also out here,

looking for inspiration.

-Hi, Larry.

-Hello, Emma, how are you?

So, you've been observing this particular reef for some years.

-Has it changed?

-I think it's perhaps silted up a little more.

But it also has this kind of layer of mud which sort of hides

a lot of the sort of intimate tiny little organisms.

How do you study it?

It's the patterning, essentially, that interests me superficially,

but also causationally what creates that patterning.

Both the sciences and the arts begin with slow looking.

You slow the looking down to a rate to which,

in the case of art,

to the rate at which I can respond with a brush.

-And you slow the looking down in order to...

-To count.

To count, to analyse. As you say, quantify. And therefore understand.

These sort of apparently nondescript locations

unveil themselves really slowly.

It's a muddy low-level reef, but it's absolutely fascinating

in the context of the environment in which it's contained.

Larry's large-scale realist paintings capture the stunning

diversity of the Western Australian coastline,

and command prices north of 100,000 from an international clientele.

What is apparently random does seem to have this kind of diagonal

perspective, lace work thing going on,

almost like a man-made mesh.

I suppose it's a combination of the way things grow and also the forces

that are acting on them, whether it's tide or weathering or wind.

And you see the same ripple marks 1,000 miles inland

in sedimentary rocks, where there's been oceans before.

That gets back to the time and change that's evident in the Pilbara.

I mean, even the beach has a red tinge

because of the dissolved earth.

There is that intermeshing of terrestrial and marine,

which sort of fascinates me here, in the Pilbara.

On location, he doesn't use a camera or a pencil.

He note-takes in watercolour.

-Just running...

-It runs down by itself.

-It is running like the tide.

Yeah, so if you use a little bit of gravity...

you get a nice, smooth progression down over that kind of surface.

So that pigment is just moving through the water.

It's seeping down through the water. OK?

So you're getting that nice sort of smooth, mirror-like effect.

People think of the Pilbara as this busy industrial thump-thump

kind of place.

But it's easy to be alone,

it's easy to be contemplative,

it's easy to feel like you are part of nature here rather than

just in some industrialised hub.

It has the full gamut for me, as an interested person and a painter.

-As it would for you as a scientist, I'd guess.

-Absolutely.

While some embrace art, others in the Pilbara

enjoy flirting with danger.

Meet a crack team of commercial divers who love to fix stuff

underwater.

And today, they're heading 38 kilometres out to sea to replace

the first marine signal post or marker buoy that ships use to

guide them through Port Hedland's shipping channel.

As you can see, she's pretty rusted out.

And not really doing her job any more.

Basically, we've got to cut it off at the bottom -

the links that are connecting it to the plant weight -

going to cut those links, this should pop up

and we'll tie it alongside here.

Replace it with the other one that's on the other side.

This is the broco torch.

This is what's used to cut the shackle to release the buoy.

And it has 100% oxygen running through it.

And that's what starts the burning heat.

It'll burn at 5,500 degrees

and that pretty much cuts through anything.

That's what the old bank robbers used to use to rob banks with.

They used them to cut into safes, so I think that's where the technology came from.

Yeah, yeah, proper tools. Yeah!

Conditions are horrible today.

As you can tell, we are rocking around, the wind's blowing.

Not quite ideal. Pretty treacherous!

Down there, approximately three metres' visibility. It'll be murky water.

You're prone to getting electrical shocks.

All the equipment is insulated as best as possible.

'Not your average workplace.

'Electric shocks, a furnace in your face

'and who-knows-what lurking in the green beyond.'

It is possible you could get attacked by a shark!

Oh, yes! And the hydrogen explosions.

There were pockets of hydrogen getting caught underneath the buoy.

And as you're burning into it,

they explode and you feel the shock waves right through all the water.

Yeah, it blows you back a bit.

Out with the old and in with the new.

All in a day's work.

The tough exterior of the Pilbara belies the bounty of the sea

and the bush that have sustained aboriginal life here for more

than 40,000 years.

Our journey continues with Professor Tim Flannery on the Burrup Peninsula,

who's looking back in time through a very rare window.

The Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago are famous

today as the minerals export hub for Australia.

But for aboriginal people, they've got a far deeper significance.

This area is home to the world's largest collection of rock art.

I'm here for the first time and I'm very excited,

because I'll be given special access to some extraordinary places.

While this is valuable ground for Australia's miners,

it's sacred for local aboriginal people.

With abundant food and fresh spring water,

this protected valley would've been a social epicentre,

complete with art gallery and community noticeboard.

It's the highest concentration of rock art in the world.

'Archaeologist Dr Ken Mulvaney has spent most of his life

'studying these ancient engravings.'

As you look up these slopes, they look an unstable

jumble of rocks, but in fact they're weathered like this in situ.

These slopes have been stable like this for 2.5 million years.

And these rocks themselves are, what, half the age of the Earth?

Absolutely. And these are amongst some of the earliest art in the world, as well.

It's extraordinary!

So these rocks are the slowest-weathering rocks on planet Earth?

This is the hardest rock that has been measured anywhere in the world.

To peck into that is very, very difficult and takes a skill.

So this is the one I wanted to show you, which is

probably a whale shark.

We're overlooking the waters and we know the whale sharks

and whales come through here.

This image, when do you think this was made?

Well these marine images -

and you can tell by the relative freshness in appearance -

have to have been done within the last 6,000-7,000 years.

And we know that because the oceans weren't here before then.

'During the last ice age, about 17,000 years ago,

'this coastline was more than 100 kilometres further out.

'As the ice caps melted, sea levels rose and transformed

'the coastal plain into the archipelago that we see today.'

So in the early art,

we get terrestrial animals dominated by the kangaroos and emus.

But in the more recent art, you get fish, turtles, dominating the art.

That environmental change is mapped in the aboriginal

reproductions of what they were living through over the last

10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years in this region

and it's all present here

on the rocks, within this landscape.

If more recent sea life imagery dominates here, then I'd like

to see what animals were recorded before the end of the ice age

-out on the islands of the Murujuga National Park.

-Hello, Tim.

-Hello, hi, Shaun.

-Welcome aboard, mate. Watch your head.

-Thank you.

There's the most extraordinary juxtaposition here of some of the

most ancient art on earth, along with some of its most modern technology.

The Murujuga rangers want to ensure that people appreciate this

incredible and unique heritage by promoting a sense of cultural safety.

For this reason, I'm unable to reveal the exact location

of where we're headed.

But it's to this uninhabited island.

'Land and sea manager Brad Rowe is taking me

'to one place he thinks I might find interesting.'

There's three of them up there.

There's one over the top of another one.

Oh, my God. It's amazing!

That one's got an erect penis.

See the other one over here, Tim?

On that panel?

Oh, God, yeah. Oh, geez, that's unbelievable!

'Tasmanian tigers, extinct on the mainland for 4,000 years

'etched in stone in the far north-west of Australia.'

This is incredible, mate.

Three adult male thylacines.

Well, that's... That's a life-size image.

-Yeah.

-It's extraordinary.

-And anatomically perfect.

-Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, to have these all in one place, you know,

this is an animal that's worshipped in some way.

But I wonder about the human eye that saw that and the brain

that conceived that work of art and executed it so perfectly.

That's a fellow human being reaching out to me about something

we both understand over 15,000 years of history.

Unimaginable depths of time.

I am just so deeply touched.

These have to be more than 10,000 years old.

They were made before the pyramids were thought of.

Before Stonehenge was thought of!

Now what is beautiful about that is that creation stories

and mythological stories, those stories haven't changed.

We have to define cultural archaeology

and show people that the carvings mean something today.

They meant something in the past

and they'll mean something for the future.

You know, people from the Judaeo-Christian tradition

look back 2,000 years and see that as ancient history.

But here you're dealing with 40,000 years of continuous

history of law written in stone.

I find that mind-blowing.

Our adventure along the Pilbara coast concludes at Cape Keraudren,

a rugged peninsula at the southern tip of Eighty Mile Beach,

where the Pilbara ends and the Kimberley begins.

Remote, but not so far away as to avoid its peculiar moment in history.

In 1922, an international team of scientists

unloaded their gear on this beach.

They had come to again test Albert Einstein's theory

of general relativity, which was first posited in 1915.

I'm no physicist, and the space-time continuum is a very difficult

concept to explain. So I'm not even going to try.

But I do know this -

the theory predicted an unusual astronomical phenomenon.

That the light from stars would be bent around massive objects like our sun.

The scientists focused their attention on solar eclipses.

With the sun in shadow,

they could observe the position of stars closest to the Sun.

The position of these stars during the eclipse could later be compared

to their same position without the sun's light-bending influence.

And so teams from California's Lick Observatory, from England

and from New Zealand,

made plans to travel to the best astronomical seats in the house -

the central line of totality was at the Wallal Downs Station.

That's here, at the edge of the never-never.

Naturally, the English and the Americans dithered about it being too venturesome,

but science prevailed and they duly arrived by plane, boat and donkey,

armed with telescopes, supplies and fly nets.

And at midday on 21 September, the sun and moon did their thing.

Photographs taken, measurements made, maths done

and, ultimately, Einstein's theory was confirmed for a second time.

Space and time aren't absolutes.

Gravity and motion can affect time and space.

It revolutionised science.

E=MC squared also heralded the coming atomic age.

And as we've already seen, this coast was also part of that history.

3.5 billion years on, the Pilbara still surprises.

This is a special place.

It's remote, even desolate.

But it's undoubtedly rewarding for those intrepid enough to make the trip.

The skies are big here, and impossibly clear.

And in such a setting, each one of us counts as no more

and no less than a grain of sand amidst all this eternity.

It's in a place like this that you can feel free to be whoever you are, or whoever you want to be.

We've reached the end of another fascinating odyssey around this vast continent.

Discovering new places...

..some far-flung.

Even wild.

But each with a unique beauty.

Steeped in unexpected history.

And recalled by folk who share a profound knowledge...

..and abiding passion about their ever-changing coast.

This coast -

Australia.